Monthly Archives: July 2009

Memo to those producing corporate training videos: Find out what might prevent a captive audience from falling asleep.

I suppose there are a dozen ways to skin this cat when it comes to making inflight announcements. Anyone who’s flown Southwest Airlines knows how a statutory script about flight safety can be given a twist, or a certain delivery to make you pay attention.

And then there’s this clothing optional approach.

Whoever thought a boring safety video would have a chance at serving a marketing function, by going viral. The best part, it’s in sync with the campaign about being up-front, and having nothing to hide.

Thanks to Yang-May Ooi,who featured this on her cross-cultural communication blog, Fusion View.

For $27 bucks this guy is selling you five CD’s that will help you make money on Twitter by building 16,000 followers in 90 days. It’s called the Twitter Traffic Machine.

The pitch video is really sleazy. And what’s with the sign up page? Those red arrows give the whole game away, don’t they? Welcome to the automated snake oil salesman.

Now if this was a joke, a way to prove that there are enough dumb people who will actually pay to have followers, more power to Bill Crosby. If not, will someone remind Mr. Crosby that the broadcast model of ‘monetizing’ eyeballs and traffic have crashed and burned?

I recently met Chase Granberry, the founder of Authority Labs. His company is competing in the SEO space — in a business category known as ‘rank monitoring.’

“What’s that,” I asked.

It’s all about knowing how your web site ranks relevant to how people use keywords, he said.

“Competitive intelligence” in other words?

It’s also about usability, too, he reminded me. Are people finding what they need on your web site?

Competitive intelligence gathering is not something many of us do on a day-to-day basis. What I found interesting is how this kind of monitoring and optimization could be done by the rest of us –and not just the chaps in IT or a back office in Mumbai.

Granberry told me that his users range from bloggers to agencies PR types, to the web team. Why? Because people are getting more conscious about keywords, and are creating content aware of the way Google, Internet Explorer, Yahoo and Bing are indexing it. PR and Interactive agencies are using the service to analyze the data and report back to their clients, he says.

“You mean the average PR person can actually understand this stuff?”

I took a peek at some of these reports, expecting to see a lot of geeky stuff. But they were really clean and well coded (up and down arrows to show a change in ranking against the previous day etc).

How do organizations spend on something like this in a downturn, I asked.

They need to think of search engine optimization as a long-term investment he said. Especially for those who seek ROI in terms of increased traffic and conversions. He mentioned ‘continued insight’ too, and it brought to mind recent cases of how lack of monitoring resulted in PR disasters such as this and this.

We increasingly hear how dangerous it can be when PR and Comms take its eye off the ball. Competitive intelligence monitoring is like putting matchsticks between your eyelids and staying alert

Indeed an interview on Twitter can be looked at as too compressed or a fascinating use of a real-time tool, especially since it is tied to a micro- social network. It poses some challenges, not so different from those I run into using VOIP (Skype) or a cell phone. In the process, the ‘twinterview’ teaches us other things as well. How to hyperlink responses, cross-post to a blog, and use a back-channel or direct messaging feature.

Friday’s guest, Jessica Hansen will be interesting. She was deep into social media when she was laid off, and has been using face-to-face and online networks to bounce back. Jessica is also taking over as pres of a chapter that has been consistently doing great things for communicators here in the Valley. Can we fit all this into a compressed micro-blogging format? Let’s see!